Installing Minikube on AWS EC2 (Ubuntu 20.04)

Kubernetes is great for large-scale applications, providing security, scalability, and portability. In cloud platforms, we can deploy Kubernetes on any well known cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure. We can manage many Worker nodes for our application as we do not need to setup a Master node on any cloud which is managed by the Cloud provider itself.

On the other hand, we have a solution to experiment with an idea, get up to speed on Kubernetes for smaller local applications. We have some local cluster setup options for CI/CD end to end testing and local configurations to fulfill our requirements before deploying on live.

There are main choices we have as shown below:

minikube
Kind
K3s, compare K3s to K8s

An Introduction to minikube

In this article, we are going to talk about installing Minikube on AWS EC2 (Ubuntu 20.04). Minikube is a tool that creates a single node Kubernetes cluster in Docker and VirtualBox ready to be used during the development of a containerized application. Minikube is a single node Kubernetes cluster and thus it has the master node and single worker node. In addition we need to setup the tool kubectl along with minikube on your Linux machine, MAC, or Windows laptop.

Install kubectl

Update the apt package index and install packages needed to use the Kubernetes apt repository:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl

Download the Google Cloud public signing key:
sudo curl -fsSLo /usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg https://packages.cloud.google.com/apt/doc/apt-key.gpg

Add the Kubernetes apt repository:
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/kubernetes-archive-keyring.gpg] https://apt.kubernetes.io/ kubernetes-xenial main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/kubernetes.list

Update apt package index with the new repository and install kubectl:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y kubectl

kubectl version --client 
Client Version: version.Info{Major:"1", Minor:"23", GitVersion:"v1.23.4", GitCommit:"e6c093d87ea4cbb530a7b2ae91e54c0842d8308a", GitTreeState:"clean", BuildDate:"2022-02-16T12:38:05Z", GoVersion:"go1.17.7", Compiler:"gc", Platform:"linux/amd64"}

Source: https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl-linux/

Install Docker

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install docker.io -y

sudo systemctl status docker.service
sudo systemctl enable docker.service

sudo systemctl restart docker.service
sudo systemctl start docker.service
sudo systemctl stop docker.service

sudo usermod -aG docker ${USER}

Install Minikube

Minimum system requirements for minikube

2 GB RAM or more
2 CPU / vCPU or more
20 GB free hard disk space or more
Docker / Virtual Machine Manager – KVM & VirtualBox

Note: I will be using Docker container as a base for minikube.

sudo curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-linux-amd64

Once the binary is downloaded, copy it to the path /usr/local/bin and set the executable permissions on it.
sudo cp minikube /usr/local/bin/minikube
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/minikube

Verify the minikube version

minikube version
minikube version: v1.25.2
commit: 362d5fdc0a3dbee389b3d3f1034e8023e72bd3a7

Start Minikube

sudo minikube status
* Profile "minikube" not found. Run "minikube profile list" to view all profiles.
  To start a cluster, run: "minikube start"

sudo minikube start --vm-driver=none
* minikube v1.25.2 on Ubuntu 20.04 (xen/amd64)
* Using the none driver based on user configuration
X Exiting due to GUEST_MISSING_CONNTRACK: Sorry, Kubernetes 1.23.3 requires conntrack to be installed in root's path
Solution:
sudo apt install conntrack

$ sudo minikube start --vm-driver=none
* minikube v1.25.2 on Ubuntu 20.04 (xen/amd64)
* Using the none driver based on user configuration
* Starting control plane node minikube in cluster minikube
* Running on localhost (CPUs=2, Memory=3924MB, Disk=15817MB) ...
* OS release is Ubuntu 20.04.4 LTS
* Preparing Kubernetes v1.23.3 on Docker 20.10.7 ...
  - kubelet.resolv-conf=/run/systemd/resolve/resolv.conf
  - kubelet.housekeeping-interval=5m
    > kubeadm.sha256: 64 B / 64 B [--------------------------] 100.00% ? p/s 0s
    > kubelet.sha256: 64 B / 64 B [--------------------------] 100.00% ? p/s 0s
    > kubectl.sha256: 64 B / 64 B [--------------------------] 100.00% ? p/s 0s
    > kubectl: 44.43 MiB / 44.43 MiB [-------------] 100.00% 46.10 MiB p/s 1.2s
    > kubeadm: 43.12 MiB / 43.12 MiB [-------------] 100.00% 30.69 MiB p/s 1.6s
    > kubelet: 118.75 MiB / 118.75 MiB [-----------] 100.00% 51.08 MiB p/s 2.5s
  - Generating certificates and keys ...
  - Booting up control plane ...
  - Configuring RBAC rules ...
* Configuring local host environment ...
*
! The 'none' driver is designed for experts who need to integrate with an existing VM
* Most users should use the newer 'docker' driver instead, which does not require root!
* For more information, see: https://minikube.sigs.k8s.io/docs/reference/drivers/none/
*
! kubectl and minikube configuration will be stored in /root
! To use kubectl or minikube commands as your own user, you may need to relocate them. For example, to overwrite your own settings, run:
*
  - sudo mv /root/.kube /root/.minikube $HOME
  - sudo chown -R $USER $HOME/.kube $HOME/.minikube
*
* This can also be done automatically by setting the env var CHANGE_MINIKUBE_NONE_USER=true
* Verifying Kubernetes components...
  - Using image gcr.io/k8s-minikube/storage-provisioner:v5
* Enabled addons: default-storageclass, storage-provisioner
* Done! kubectl is now configured to use "minikube" cluster and "default" namespace by default

Check Minikube Status:

sudo minikube status
minikube
type: Control Plane
host: Running
kubelet: Running
apiserver: Running
kubeconfig: Configured

Deployment vs. Service

A deployment is responsible for keeping a set of pods running.

A service is responsible for enabling network access to a set of pods.

Running First Container

sudo kubectl run hello-minikube --image=gcr.io/google_containers/echoserver:1.10 --port=8080
pod/hello-minikube created

sudo kubectl get pods
NAME             READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
hello-minikube   1/1     Running   0          57s

Kubectl run no longer creates a deployment, it creates a pod as the instructions are slightly different now so I will change the command to create a deployment, check the below example to know the updated instructions:

sudo kubectl create deployment hello-minikube --image=k8s.gcr.io/echoserver:1.10
deployment.apps/hello-minikube created

sudo kubectl get pods
NAME                              READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
hello-minikube-7bfc84c94b-wsk7w   1/1     Running   0          33s

sudo kubectl get deployment
NAME             READY   UP-TO-DATE   AVAILABLE   AGE
hello-minikube   1/1     1            1           51s

sudo kubectl expose deployment hello-minikube --type=NodePort --port=8080
service/hello-minikube exposed

sudo kubectl get services
NAME             TYPE        CLUSTER-IP      EXTERNAL-IP   PORT(S)          AGE
hello-minikube   NodePort    10.101.77.125   <none>        8080:31602/TCP   18s
kubernetes       ClusterIP   10.96.0.1       <none>        443/TCP          20m

Deployment and service yaml files are separate in the project but you can combine them in a single file, too.

apiVersion – Which version of the Kubernetes API you’re using to create this object
kind – What kind of object you want to create (service, application, etc.)
metadata – Data that helps uniquely identify the object (like a name, a label, etc.)
spec – What state you desire for the object (container info, exposed ports, etc.)

Note: Port 31602 is the EC2 Instance Port where the Port 8080 of the container is exposed. We will change with Public IP to verify services.

sudo minikube service hello-minikube --url
http://172.31.42.79:31602
http://3.20.233.25:31602

Output of the URL

Hostname: hello-minikube-7bfc84c94b-wsk7w
Pod Information:
-no pod information available-
Server values:
server_version=nginx: 1.13.3 - lua: 10008
Request Information:
client_address=172.17.0.1
method=GET
real path=/
query=
request_version=1.1
request_scheme=http
request_uri=http://3.20.233.25:8080/
Request Headers:
accept=text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3;q=0.9
accept-encoding=gzip, deflate
accept-language=en-US,en;q=0.9
connection=keep-alive
host=3.20.233.25:31602
upgrade-insecure-requests=1
user-agent=Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/99.0.4844.51 Safari/537.36
Request Body:
-no body in request-

My EC2 Instance has an IPv4 Public IP of 3.20.233.25. And since my hello-minikube port 8080 is exposed on port 31602, the address that I placed on my browser is 3.20.233.25:31602.

See the request_uri of the page displayed by the web browser, it says that I am accessing via port 8080.

Now we will delete deployments, services, and shutdown services.

Delete the exposed service (port)

sudo kubectl delete services hello-minikube
service "hello-minikube" deleted

Delete the deployed container (hello-minikube)

sudo kubectl delete deployment hello-minikube
deployment.apps "hello-minikube" deleted

Stopping Minikube/Shutting Down the Cluster

sudo minikube stop
* Stopping node "minikube"  ...
* 1 node stopped.

Conclusion

That’s all you need to know about installing Minikube on EC2 Ubuntu server. I hope the above article helps when you want to use Minikube on EC2 Ubuntu. There are more tutorials that will go into deeper explanation of using Kubernetes thoroughly, but this is a simple article to just get familiar with installing Minikube on AWS EC2 (Ubuntu 20.04)